I’ve been reading plenty of articles lately that express even seasoned professionals have been known to make some of these same SEO mistakes, so don’t overlook these 5 basic principles.

Filling your article with too many keywords will actually do you more harm than good.

Search engine robots go out of their way to look for keyword stuffing, and will actually penalize your page ranking if your article is full of senseless keywords that are not revenant to your topic.

Besides, you’re not doing yourself or your readers any favors by filling your article with keywords in hopes to rank on Google’s first page. As a matter of fact, your readers will pick up on the tactic and leave your sight and probably never return.

2. Title Tags (or lack thereof )

This is probably the single most important factor in SEO optimization and a common SEO mistake.

Title Tags should contain specific keyword phrases and need to be in your title or headline. Google reads from left to right so make sure your keyword is one of the first 3 or 4 words if possible. Leaving out a title tag will just confuse the search engines, forcing them to choose what they think your keyword should be. You should strive to keep your title tag to a maximum of 200 characters. This is a biggie when it comes to SEO mistakes.

3. Missing Description

A precise description which includes your keyword phrase in a few places is imperative and another common SEO mistake. No description for your blog post can cause the search engines to pick anything off your page, OR, they won’t know what to use and not rank our site at all.

4. Simple Anchor Text

Prime example of other SEO mistakes are the lack of anchor text. Anchor text is the hyperlinked words on a web page, you know, the words that are usually in blue and underlined.

Deep links – These links shouldn’t be to your homepage, but to the permalink of your individual blog post. Deep links are also best used when linked to static pages on your site such as the “About” page or a Resources page. Any Page that is permeant and normally found near your home page link. Click the links to see what I mean.

5. Alt Tags On Images

To further increase your SEO, be sure and re-title all of your images prior to uploading them to your blog. Be sure to use your keyword in the title of the image, the same keyword which is part of your title tag. Let’s say Italy is your main keyword, then img_0073.jpg is not a proper title for your image. Instead, if your article is about your trip to Italy, then the title of your image could be: “Coliseum in Italy.jpg”

So how many SEO mistakes are your making? Do any of these sound familiar? I found a great WordPess SEO plugin to correct all my SEO mistakes as I build each post. You can find a video explaining the details here.

I would really like to hear your comments so tell me what you did or didn’t like below. Thanks for stopping by, oh and do me a favor. If you enjoyed this post about SEO Mistakes, please share it with your friends.

Thanks for your comment! I agree, SEO Pressor is a great tool which has been a big help with my SEO as well. Times have changed with the Panda and Penguin update and I’m not sure how relevant this plugin is now.

This is a great post, and I have found it almost effortless to get ranked on Google for the keyword phases I target in each of my blog posts just by using these techniques.

I have to admit that I have a secret (maybe not so secret) weapon called SEO Pressor that has helped educate and remind me of what I need to do to maximize my efforts to get posts ranked in the search engines.